Is [Aella's appeal] because she's willing to get naked on camera, taking out all the guesswork and imagination for her simps?
Not quite — it's more psychological.
I think there are multiple reasons Aella is used to being fawned over, but three primarily stand out in my mind:
1. There is a sort of back-of-mind mentality that a lot of people who work in tech have, like a grown-up jock-nerd mindset toward the world; this is obviously not how the world works, as there are tons of smart athletes. But a lot of people will carry this mentality into adulthood and won't be attracted to normal escorts because the escorts might act like women who rejected them in high school. Aella is a safe option for these people; they feel like she is on their 'side'. (The very indoctrinated people will say she "is grey tribe.")
2. Of course, there are people who are simply racist and want a woman who looks exceptionally pale and white like she does. When I was an escort I benefited from a similar thing because at the time I had Robert Pattinson Twilight aesthetics. There *are* people whose aesthetic preferences are strongly dictating this, especially when it comes to race, and this is just an unfortunate reality for any kind of sex work.
3. But, and I think this is the most central category of Aella's appeal to this crowd: a lot of these people base their identity around their intelligence and would believe that they are debasing themselves if they sleep with a stupid escort. For example, they wouldn't go to a strip club, because they would believe that the women there are stupid. Since Aella is hyper-overtly advertised as smart, they believe that they are "allowed" to be attracted to her and desire her in ways that they wouldn't a normal prostitute or whatever.
@Alfred MacDonald can you elaborate on what you meant by being cancelled? Were you just kicked from the SlateStarCodex discord by some simp discord moderator or was it more personal? Also have you ever met Scott Alexander? Is he a turbocuck irl?
Sure. There is a rule about "keeping your embarrassing details to yourself" so I don't know if answering this question will violate that but I'll try.
Also, it's long, but I have a whole post about this already written up @
https://archive.md/TryVI. I'll try to condense this down for y'all.
So, first: yes, it absolutely involves a simp discord moderator. The simpiest. Alex Zavoluk (AlexZ) would sit next to Aella at every opportunity, and would side with her in absurd arguments he'd normally dismantle if a man made them; he also asked her out on their first meeting. There was
universal agreement about this bias.
Second: yes, it is also absolutely personal. I had a romance with a woman — we never dated, but exchanged 8,500 DMs over two months — and Lots Of Things Happened. (Just to name one example: she was in the process of ending a relationship, so we agreed to not talk to each other for a few months until she had sorted it out. Roughly a week later this same woman shows up at a party she thinks I will be attending in a gorgeous dark red dress; I get a message at 12AM "why weren't you there?" — this was an intense and chaotic and extremely emotional thing.)
At one point I told her the story of how I was shot at when I went to a strip club after a breakup. The whole story is in audio form
here but I'll just leave the key points:
- Strip clubs in Texas are often open until 5AM and are often BYOB, while bars in Texas close at 2AM. So if you want to get drunk and have loud music drown out your brain — which you might want to do if, say, a woman you loved a lot just broke up with you — this is a great place to make your head empty for a bit.
- I wasn't truly "shot at"; I was behind a wall/bush and a guy was firing his gun at the club. (But then again, I was hiding with another guy who had his leg shot in a previous shooting at the same club. Either way, I didn't feel especially in danger; the security team had the aggression and energy like they were ready to take down El Chapo. I would hire them in an instant if I knew the name of the firm and needed protection)
- I live in San Antonio, TX. This is one of the few major cities in the US where you will often be a minority if you are white. There were, maybe, 3-5 white people in this club of easily 100+ patrons. One was a mousey, blonde white chick who I strongly suspected was under 21. Most of the patrons who were women were other strippers coming to see their friends, and most of the patrons in general seemed to be guys who had something to prove to their other guy friends or themselves. The mousey white girl stuck out like a sore thumb. So I asked her "what do you get out of this?" — she answered with "ASS AND TITTIES". I lost curiosity around then.
The woman I was involved with hyperfocused on the fact that I talked to "21 year olds with nothing in their eyes" and was practically in a rage for an hour over this. The "being shot at part" was a non-consideration, nor any other aspect of this story; it was just "your feelings for me don't mean anything if this is what can get you interested." This was extremely out of character for her and I had never heard her talk to me this way.
So, we (several of us from Austin LessWrong) had a relationship chat. A large part of this was because we could not say much negative about Aella openly without repercussion, but we ended up talking about relationships enough that it became the focus of our chat.
I shared the screenshots where my ... whatever-she-was went off on me. I wanted a sanity check, i.e. "is this sane? Should I have reacted the way I did? What should I do?" — and so on.
I did not know this at the time, but the LessWrong/ACX sphere has
extremely bizarre and paranoid norms about "doxxing" (by which they just mean realnaming, i.e. using someone's real name) and extremely paranoid norms around sharing information in general. This incident caused three people to leave our group.
A while later I called out a stupid post Aella made
here on my FB. I was chastised for this in the local discord because Aella "could not respond." (Yes, she could not; she is not my fb friend and I didn't want her commentary. This was more of a PSA than something I'm up for debating.)
This was when the pile-on happened. At this same time, someone had been DMing women in the discord that I was "a manipulator" and "a sociopath", "based on my reddit history". This was almost certainly someone involved with Colin Popell ("
orthonormalist") who runs
https://aristillus.xyz. This is because I stopped using reddit in 2017, and deleted my account in 2019, and this event took place in late 2021. Only someone who knew me from a long time ago would do this, and people close to Colin Popell had an axe to grind with me.
One among them was Eigenrobot, AKA Samuel Henly, who is the central figure in the "postrationalist" twitter sphere. (Yes, this exists.) Colin Popell is/was moving to Texas, and was friends with
Ryan Abel, a carnivore diet advocate I regularly beefed with who would repost BS-spewing fitness influencers of the likes of
Solbrah (Carl Genz). At one point
he cited my own reddit post against me in an argument not knowing I had wrote it. (And apparently not having read all of it; his argument was that oral birth control is categorically bad, and I had an addendum comment specifying that DHEA from most grocery stores should be enough to ameliorate those side effects.)
Colin had two primary reasons to not want me around, one of which is good and one of which is scandalous:
1. He introduced me to an ex girlfriend of mine, who was BPD and broke up with me 13 separate times. This was a traumatizing relationship for her and me. However, since Colin introduced us, she'd only talk to him when things were horrible on her end. Therefore, his impression of me was probably very bad, and based on what information he had I could see why.
2. Eigenrobot / Samuel, as I said, is a central figure if not *the* figure of the "postrationalist" movement. His wife is Mackenzie Henly. Before they had dated, Mackenzie and I used to sext a lot. She had admitted that she wanted, or at least thought about, having my children. (We ultimately had no nonverbal chemistry when we videochatted, so I figured we would not work.)
Therefore, it is somewhat problematic if the central figure of a movement you are trying to start is enemies with a person whose wife wanted to have the babies of that enemy,
and whose current babies would not exist had he not been disinterested in her.
So, to summarize "why were you canceled":
1. Yes, a simp discord moderator.
2. Yes, personal reasons / sharing screenshots of personal things.
3. Various scary DMs about me being "a manipulator" who were probably from Colin, who knew one of my ex girlfriends only when we were at our worst.
4. I used to sext with the wife of the most prominent postrationalist before they were a thing, and she wanted to have my children. In effect, this means his children would not exist had I not been disinterested in her. You can understand why this would make someone a bit irrational, even despite their best efforts to be objective.
As for "have you met Scott Alexander IRL" — no; after I was banned they had temporarily banned
the entire city of San Antonio and took great caution to make sure that when Scott arrived in Austin I could not know where he was. I think Scott is fine, though; his writing about psychiatric subject matter is very good.
